The Deathsniffer’s Assistant (The Faraday Files Book 1) (50 page)

When Olivia reached out a hand to try and grab the Duchess’s shoulder, she tripped over her crutches and pitched forward. She was stopped from hitting the ground only by the quick reaction of one of the lifeknitters, who hauled her to her feet and immediately pushed her harshly backwards. Anyone but Olivia would have fallen and been left behind. “We’re trying to
save
this woman,” the lifeknitter snapped, and hurried on after the stretcher and his peers while Olivia made a frustrated hissing noise and fell back beside Officer Dawson and Chris.

“What happened?” Olivia asked again, never so much as taking her eyes from the red bath of the Duchess’s stretcher. She swung her crutches like she’d been born with three legs instead of two.

“I don’t know anything you don’t,” Officer Dawson replied sharply, her own eyes locked on the Duchess’s shivering body just as Olivia’s were.

“Bollocks. Where was she found? How is she injured?”

“Shot in the shoulder,” Officer Dawson ground out. “Standard issue firepistol from what I could tell, but they wouldn’t let
me
close, either. Lacerations, too. Deep ones, all over her. It might have been a windpistol, but I doubt it. Not a knife, though. Too many cuts too quickly for a knife. They found her in her gardens at the estate. Flew her into town by the val Daren winged carriage. And
that’s
everything I know.”

“Caldwell?”

Officer Dawson hissed in frustration. “Just reached the station before I responded to
this
bullshit,” she spat. “Five good coppers swearing on their stripes she was shacked to the seats in the back of a police car when this happened.”

“I knew it,” Olivia muttered, and then seemed to notice Chris. She shot him a hard glare. “Why aren’t you writing anything down? Where’s your notebook?” she snapped.

He gaped at her. “In the back of a
burnt out taxi
?” he responded incredulously.

She blinked and looked quickly away, but not before he actually saw something like shame bloom deep in her eyes. She focused her attention back on the stretcher and Chris
heard
her teeth grind and her jaw creak as she saw all the answers she might ever find leaking out with the Duchess’s lifeblood. “
Shit,
” she cursed loudly, and then they all turned into a room.

The lifeknitters expertly moved the Duchess from the stretcher she was carried in on onto a white bed. Those fresh sheets soaked through with blood in an instant. Olivia moved up to her side again, and none of the lifeknitters protested her presence, but flowed around her like a river around a stone.

“
Duchess
,” Olivia said, reaching out to grip Duchess val Daren’s closest shoulder in her hand. “
Duchess
, I need you to look at me.”

The lifeknitter on the opposite side reached out to hover a hand over the Duchess’s heart, closing her eyes and swaying slightly on her feet. “We need to stop the bleeding,” she said quickly. “Her heartbeat is too fast. She can’t take it.”

“
Who
did this to you, Duchess? You need to tell me, you need to
tell
me so I can
fix
it.”

A second lifeknitter joined the first. He turned up the Duchess’s hand, laid two fingers against her wrist. His eyes half-lidded and the eyes beneath seemed to be staring at something only he could see. “I’m in the bloodstream,” he said. “It’s…it’s too thin, we…there’s too much blood gone and it’s still…”

One more lifeknitter was there with a needle and thread held between her thumb and forefinger with the touch of an expert, but she wasn’t closing any of the cuts, merely staring at the Duchess’s body in confused, overwhelmed horror. “There’s too
many
,” she cried. “I can’t―I don’t even know where to―”

“
Who did this to you?
” Olivia
shook
the Duchess. The woman’s head lolled from side to side and her mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning on a dock. “Just say a name. Just a fucking
name
and it’ll be
over
.”

Yet another figure in white with three linked circles over their heart pulled down the sheet covering the Duchess’s chest. Chris’s eyes widened in horror. The burn covered her entire left shoulder; the hole punched directly through her upper chest. Somehow, it was more horrific than even the burned corpses on Grapevine Street had been, because of how clean and white the flesh around it was, how the Duchess still barely lived through it, staring up at the ceiling and gasping for air. Her breath rattled in her chest.

“Duchess.” Olivia put her face right above the other woman’s, so their noses were touching. She gripped her chin between her fingers and
shook
her head like a ragdoll’s. “Duchess, look. Look at me.
Look
at me.
Who. Did. This
?”

The lifeknitter who’d been holding the Duchess’s wrist released it and stepped back, shaking his head. “I don’t know what we can do. I don’t think there’s…anything.”

“Put some pressure on the damn lacerations! Do
something
. She’s still breathing!” one of the others cried. “We don’t
give up!
”

But the rest of the lifeknitters all stepped back, but for the one with her hand over the Duchess’s heart. One by one, they raised their hands to the linked circles on their breasts, eyes closing in despair and defeat.

The Duchess’s hand flew up. It wrapped around Olivia’s wrist. Her eyes focused abruptly. “Deathsniffer,” she said urgently.

“
Yes
,” Olivia said breathlessly. “
Yes
, that’s me. Duchess. That’s me. Tell me, how did this to you? Just say a name. All you have to do is say a name. Who was it? Who was it?”

But the Duchess merely gasped for air, rattling like the bones of a long-dead corpse. The fingers gripping Olivia’s wrist in a white-knuckled grasp loosened one by one, and then the hand fell onto the reddened sheets beneath her. “Ahh…” The Duchess breathed. “Ahh…”

“Duchess.”

“James…”

“
Duchess
.”

“A…Ana…” The last sounded more like the Maiden’s sigh than a name, but the horrific, creaking, hoarse breath that was drawn after it was like the opening of the gates of the third hell.

It was the last one.

The lifeknitter whose fingers had hovered, splayed, over the Duchess’s heart slowly withdrew her hand. She shook her head slowly, and then raised it to lay against the linked circles on her heart. “May she sing with the Maiden,” she murmured, and her words were echoed by all the other lifeknitters in the room, doctors, nurses, assistants and all. “May she sit with the Mother. May she be guided by the Crone.”

“May she find peace,” they all said in unison.

“
No,
” Olivia cried, and, to Chris’s utter shock and horror, she
pounded
on the dead woman’s chest with a closed fist. “No,
no
, you stupid
bitch
, all you had to―all you had to
fucking
do was say a
fucking name
!”

And then Officer Dawson was there, gripping Olivia by her shoulders and
yanking
her away from the body. “
Faraday!
” she said the name as a command. Olivia fought her for a moment, twisting in her grip and reaching out with clawed fingers, and Chris feared they may come to genuine blows…but then Olivia went limp in the policewoman’s arms, her crutches falling to the ground in a clatter.

Officer Dawson passed the lifeless Deathsniffer into the arms of a nearby lifeknitter, bending down to retrieve the crutches. “She should probably go back to her room. She was badly hurt and she’s obviously worked herself up,” the policewoman said, handing the crutches to a different lifeknitter, who nodded in agreement.

Olivia said nothing to Chris, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He knew, however, that he had no desire to remain in the hospital room with the dead-silent lifeknitters and the corpse. A thousand images from the night of the Floating Castle flashed through his head. After less than a second’s hesitation, he trailed after the lifeknitters guiding Olivia. He tried not to be noticed, even though he was sure he was. They didn’t appear to take offense to his presence, however, and after they finished laying Olivia back in her bed―and she stared at the wall with blank eyes and blank face―one of them turned to him and, without saying a word, prodded with strong fingers at his puckered stitches.

His skin tingled strangely where the man’s fingertips pressed against him. The lifeknitter’s features slackened. He knew the man had slipped beneath his skin and was seeing all the mysteries there―his skull, his brain―and shuddered at the thought. At least, he reminded himself, he hadn’t been categorized as a lifeknitter. The abilities themselves were awful enough. The thought of spending his days locked in the white prison of a hospital, replaying memories of the worst night of his life over and over again…

The lifeknitter withdrew his fingertips. “What day is it?” he asked gently.

Chris managed a grim sort of smile. Or at least, a grimace. “Eadday,” he said. “And my name is Christopher Buckley.”

The lifeknitter flashed his white teeth in a smile through his beard. “I see you’ve already been given the test.” He scanned his eyes over the stitches again and nodded once. “You can leave, I think. Come back in a week and we’ll have those removed. Otherwise, you’re in remarkably good shape, considering what you’ve been through.”

Chris couldn’t help it. He slid his eyes to Olivia, whose blank gaze was as unnerving as the Duchess’s horrible last breath had been. “What about her?” he asked quietly.

“She’ll need to stay overnight. Don’t worry. We’ll keep a close eye on her.”

“Ah,” said Chris. He smiled politely at the lifeknitter, who smiled back and moved towards the door. The other one fluffed Olivia’s pillows, examined her leg, arranged her crutches against the wall, and then smiled at Chris on her way out, as well. Olivia didn’t stir the entire time, simply stared and stared at the wall, barely blinking. Barely breathing.

Chris studied her empty expression. His eyes clung to her lifelessly pale skin, the dull gleam in her eyes. Her fingers were limp where they laid at her side, and her body was barely curled. He licked his lips, considering saying something. To ask if she was all right, perhaps, or simply to excuse himself before turning to leave. He
had
to go home, after all. After a mad sort of day like today, after
everything
that had happened…he had never needed to go home so badly in his entire life.

He turned away from Olivia and took one step towards the door. Just one.

And then he turned back.

He walked to her bedside, unsure of what he was doing, exactly, but certain of his need to do it. He settled into the chair there, crossed his legs, and waited.

Olivia stirred after only a moment. She raised one of her limp hands to push hair away from her face, and for the first time, he noticed how scorched the ends were, how clumps were gone. How unlike him, not to notice something like that. She blinked slowly, and then rapidly, before settling her gaze on him and focusing her eyes onto his face. She grimaced and squinted. “Don’t you have somewhere to go?” she asked, and neither her boundless, unnerving cheer, nor her snapping anger, nor her listless and strange sadness were in her voice. There was nothing there at all.

Chris cracked a smile, very small. “Yes,” he said quietly. “But you don’t.”

She closed her eyes. “No,” she murmured. “No, I don’t.”

They sat in silence for a long period of time. Olivia moved onto her back, wincing as she moved her leg. She breathed, now, her chest rising and falling. Her eyes remained closed, but a bit of life slowly returned to her features. Just a bit. But it was just enough. At first, Chris’s thoughts were at home, with Rosemary, with Fernand, even with Miss Albany. He thought about all the things that had been said, Combs’s claims that Miss Albany was some sort of reformist spy, Miss Albany’s references to the exact strange phenomenon that he’d nearly forgotten experiencing the night before. He thought of Rosemary. Gods, Rosemary, caught up in all of this. What would he do for her? What
could
he do for her?

But the thoughts drifted away from him, pulled out to sea, and they left him thinking more clearly about the burning carriage, he and Olivia pushing it over together, how her quick thinking had saved his life. And thinking, too, about Duchess val Daren and Analaea and even the Duke. With the Duchess dead, was this even Olivia’s investigation, anymore?

And he thought of Olivia. He tried, he really did try, to understand how she thought, why she was who she was, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t fathom her.

She spoke into the silence.

“I ruined that woman’s life.”

Chris held his tongue. He wasn’t sure what to say.

Olivia pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes. “I did,” she continued. “She came to me for help finding out who killed her husband, and I bloody terrorized her. She was right. It
was
my fault her daughter died thinking she was a villain. And right up until the very moment she breathed her last, I was there in her face having no gentleness of heart for her, wasn’t I? In a way, I suppose it might be my fault she died at all. If I weren’t so bloody convinced it was her all along, maybe I’d have found the bastard who really did it. Maybe could have saved the girl, too. I’m a right piece of work, aren’t I?”

Chris found his tongue felt too big for his mouth. “It wasn’t―” he tried, and then faltered. “You’re not―” he tried again, but that seemed to go nowhere, as well.

“It was,” Olivia sighed. “I am.” She shook her head and let her hands fall to her sides. Her voice sounded limp and hopeless. Another moment of quiet, and then, “I don’t feel badly,” she said quietly. “That’s bloody buggered, isn’t it? I don’t bloody feel badly at all. I tortured that woman. I convinced her daughter she was a murderer. I called her a killer when she was just a cunt, and I wouldn’t even let her
die
in peace. I should hate myself. I should.” She shook her head from side to side, slowly. “But I don’t.” She squeezed her eyelids tight. “I never do.”